


This Is Not Just Another Day

by Savy_tries_to_be_a_writer



Category: Arrow (TV 2012)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-20
Updated: 2015-01-20
Packaged: 2018-04-14 01:42:23
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,899
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4545339
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Savy_tries_to_be_a_writer/pseuds/Savy_tries_to_be_a_writer
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Set after "the Climb" (mid-season finale of season 3), we see a broken team Arrow and Black Canary trying to work a 'mission' and struggling hard with all sorts of feelings.</p>
            </blockquote>





	This Is Not Just Another Day

“Digg, on your left. No wait, sorry, my left, that’s your right. Wait, is that even you?” Felicity was checking all three of her screens simultaneously, a familiar figure in each of them and a scary unknown person creeping up in the middle one behind one of the leathered-up members of her team. Which one it was, she was unsure. She had lost track of who moved where because she had gotten a phone call of a very lovely detective - pardon her - captain who had torn her attention away from the possibly dangerous situation on her screens. 

Captain Lance had not called her since before Oliver had gone to fight Ra’s Al Ghul. She had not heard his voice for two weeks. No one was allowed to know the Arrow wasn’t exactly in Starling City right now, and especially no one who could possibly connect the Arrow to Oliver. The cover story she had come up with for Oliver’s disappearance after they hadn’t heard from him in 5 days was that he had gone for a brush-up seminar on company management and team leadership in Vegas. Stupid. Felicity had had it pointed out to her more than once that she should work on her cover-up stories, and for this one it would have probably come in handy had she spent a bit more time on coming up with something more plausible. Thea had called her out on it.

“Ollie taking classes? To further his education?  _Out of his own free will_?” She scoffed. “We  _are_ talking about the guy who got kicked out of four ivy league colleges, right?” Even the memory of it brought a twinge to Felicity’s guts. “Felicity, you can just tell me if he needs some time alone. He’s done this before, you know,” Thea had said, picking up a few odd bottles that were on the bar at the club. In turning she added “How come you’re not off with him, though?”

 _Stop_. She couldn’t go back to that now. Her mind was already not where it was supposed to be, but she needed to keep herself from spiraling. Which she was. And every day brought it on a little more.

“That was  _me_ , Felicity, and thank you for the heads up. What did my dad have to say on the phone?” Laurel’s voice rang through her thoughts. Her blonde wig sat perfectly like before, but the scary figure creeping up behind, well, turns out Laurel, lay flat on the ground with his eyes closed. Felicity had missed the fight as well. A whole minute had gone by. She took off her glasses and rubbed the bridge of her nose a little too hard.

“He was asking about our bomber. I told him we were working on it.” It had been a long day already, and as soon as she put her glasses back on, Felicity realized that this night wasn’t going to bring much relief. Diggle - or was it Roy? Usually so easy to distinguish one from the other, right now Felicity felt like she was trying to identify Waldo when he wasn’t wearing his shirt in a beach picture. One of them was moving fast toward the building the three were scoping out. The building was an odd looking, almost quaint family house in downtown Starling, near the docks. They were trying to find out if that was indeed the place their current villain conceived her plans, or if she was just leading them there to walk into a trap, or worse, hurt an innocent family in trying to get to her.

This woman. She was vicious and driven by some unknown force of strength. Her objective seemed to be to target everyone. She put a small explosive in a small National Bank, on a bench in the Riverborough Park close to a playground and her last endeavor was a blown-up container in the harbour. As far as records showed, there was nothing in the container when it blew up. Even Felicity couldn’t find any traces of it being loaded. And no one knew how the incidents were connected. If Oliver was here, he…

Felicity refused to let herself go there. She refused to let her mind go anywhere in regards to Oliver at the moment. He wasn’t missing. He was taking care of things. Loose ends. He was coming back.  _He was alive_. Felicity knew it, she didn’t have any other explanations, she didn’t have any other way to think.  _Not_ believing he was alive would be worse than dying. Because how are you better off an empty shell forced to live on when you’ve broken beyond repair?  _Snap out of it, woman!_

“Roy, what are you doing?” It had to be Roy, Diggle wouldn’t make a rash decision like this. “Working on it” came through the coms, agitated and lonely. “Roy wait, I can’t tell if anyone’s in there, this could be a trap she works with  _explosives_.” In her left screen, where she immediately put a post-it with  _Roy_  on, the figure ducked behind a bush close to the front door. In the middle of her three screens, Lauren carefully but boldly -as was her custom- crept closer to the backside of the house. “Why else would some creepy guy come up to Laurel if it wasn’t the right place?” Diggle on the right screen took his place behind a garbage bin. He looked into the street camera Felicity had hacked to have an eye on them.

“Because she doesn’t want us to know it’s a trap and weigh us into safety. She’s cunning like that.” The last two of her explosions proved that. Felicity hadn’t gotten the necessary information in time to stop them from going off. Work at Palmer Industries had kept her busy. Work in the foundry had kept her tired. Letting her mind wander had kept her distraught.

“Guys, I don’t know what to tell you right now. I’m getting nothing, no heat sensitive cameras, no special occurrences, I can show you the blueprint of the house but that’s about it.” Felicity was unprepared. She couldn’t focus. The air was getting thick in that basement. “Felicity just take a deep breath,” Diggle’s voice came calming over the radio, “Is there something you  _can_ tell us?” Felicity had to look away from the screen for a minute. She was starting to panic and looking at the otherwise so comforting screen wasn’t helping her calm down at all. But the salmon ladder was no good, either. The glass cases displaying arrows didn’t help at all. If she looked just a little bit further right she would see  _the hood_ …

It took tremendous effort to not continue her gaze to the right. Instead the blonde went back to her screen, inch by inch, one breath at a time. Until her gaze fell upon the edge of the table. In a barely noticeable dark green pot she saw the fern. How long was it since she had actually seen it? Oh god, how long since it had had any water? Felicity stuck her finger into the soil and to her surprise it was quite moist, exactly the right feeling. The leaves of the fern were a succulent green, and, stroking the sprigs, she noticed they were as soft as the day she bought it.

“ _It thrives in low light_ ,” she whispered, a smile playing around her mouth. Oliver’s smile flashed before her eyes from when she told him that. Oliver was getting better before he left for his battle with Rha’s Al Ghul. And he was going to continue when he got back. Felicity didn’t know why, but thinking about his smile made her all the more sure that Oliver was going to be ok. She wasn’t yet ready to let him go, and he  _wasn’t done fighting_. And neither was she.

With a determined spin Felicity turned back to the screens and started clicking away on her keyboard. Just a minute had passed and Roy, Laurel and Diggle were patiently waiting for her answer.  _Bless them_ , she thought to herself. A lightbulb burst in the back of the foundry but for once Felicity was actually concentrated on what was in front of her, the first time that had happened in days, and she didn’t so much as twitch. “Patrol reports of the area say that that nothing unusually has been going on here the past week, and phone records show regular usage of the landlines. It seems like there’s really just a middle-class family living here. Aw, their family portrait looks cute. Oh wait a second-” a new tab opened on Felicity’s left screen, right under Roy’s camera, and it made her ponytail flip between her shoulder blades.

“They’re not home right now, they boarded a flight to Michigan 5 days ago. The whole family. I have a camera feed of all four of them walking out of the Michigan airport 5 days ago. They’re not home.”

“Then why are the lights on and we can clearly see movement inside? How about known relatives flying into Starling city during the past week?” Felicity took a quick look over her screens. She had looked that up before. “No, they’re all in Michigan. No flight records of anyone traveling here within the past 6 months. No one should be there in there.” Roy had already jumped up and Laurel crept closer to the house still. “Permission to go inside then?”

Felicity could hear the jumpiness and sarcasm in Roy’s voice even though his hooded figure was barely visible on her screen. She took another quick look at the blueprints of the house and made some quick guesses at where a bomb would have most impact. The stairs to the first floor were a good guess. Maybe the front door? No, someone as vicious as this woman would want her opponent to get as close to the bomb as possible so they definitely wouldn’t make it out of harm’s way if they did detect it. The little space beneath the stairs, in between the kitchen doorframe leading to the dining room – that seemed like the right place to plant a bomb.

“Yes,  _but_ ,” Felicity was quick to add, “Laurel, when you go in through the back, you enter the kitchen.  _Don’t go straight ahead_ , instead there should be a door at the far left of the room. Go that way. It’s less like to have a hidden bomb somewhere. Roy, don’t take the front door just to be safe. Go join Laurel, and Dig, it’s best if you keep an eye on them from the living room side of the house. I don’t see why she would place a bomb at the front door, but best to not take any bets. And if anything goes wrong, you’ll be a jump away.” Diggle chuckled slightly.

“Sounds like a plan.” Roy moved towards the back of the house and approached the house with Laurel. Felicity took another deep breath. They were going to be fine. They were going to make it.  _She_ was going to make it, and Oliver was going to make it back to her. One mission at a time until then. And tomorrow she was taking a half-day off work at Palmer Industries. It was time for her to sleep in – and probably buy another fern to keep Ambrosia company.

**Author's Note:**

> I feel like I need to take a class in tagging things or something, like "tagging 101".   
> Come tell me about things on my tumblr, an-effed-up-mess.tumblr.com .  
> I appreciate all criticism and comments on my work! I'm not trained for this, and though I'm not going to make this a profession or source of income, I am eager to learn to do this well!! Have a lovely week!!


End file.
